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New Statesman
7 hours ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
The MoD's Afghan data breach shows us who we really are
Hundreds of people are evacuated out of Afghanistan by British armed forces in August 2021. Photo by Ben Shread/MoD Crown Copyright via Getty Images The Afghan data breach was not an isolated incident. Between 2023 and 2024, there were 569 known cases in which the Ministry of Defence (MoD) failed to keep sensitive information safe: software compromised, devices missing, documents mishandled. On 16 July it was revealed that a UK official had accidentally leaked information on 18,714 Afghan nationals applying for a government relocation scheme for those who had helped the British military. Before that, the MoD had made public the identities of 265 Afghan collaborators, most of whom were interpreters, in a stray email in 2021. It had left its payroll system vulnerable to hackers who gained access to the names and bank details of British military personnel. And it had admitted to losing hundreds of government assets, from laptops and memory sticks to a Glock pistol and a First World War machine gun. What explains this pattern of failings? It appears that by removing security checks, foregoing proper data protection, cutting back on staff and hiring outside contractors, the MoD laid the foundations for the unfolding national scandal. The leaks thus reflect the deeper maladies of the British state: a decrepit structure, starved of skills and resources, which is willing to meddle in the affairs of foreign countries yet incapable of running its own IT. It is equally the latest reverberation from the new century's version of imperialism, when Tony Blair hymned overseas conquest like Kipling reborn, and the British army marched through deserts it had last seen in 1880. The New Labour era was a period of peculiar political and geopolitical arrogance. Today, Keir Starmer praises the record of these governments and cites it as a model for his own, even as their legacies threaten to undermine his leadership and give succour to his right-wing opponents. Nostalgists for the Blair-Brown era tend to bracket its foreign policy, presenting the war on terror as a blunder that needn't detract from domestic achievements like Sure Start or the national minimum wage. But the Afghan debacle shows that these two spheres cannot be separated; the national and international dimensions of Blairism followed the same economic logic. As New Labour embarked on its state-building projects abroad, it simultaneously hollowed out the state at home, marketising those parts of it that hadn't yet been sold off by the Tories. The MoD was the second biggest departmental spender on private finance initiatives, raining hellfire down on Iraq and Afghanistan with the help of an emboldened private sector, to which it handed billions worth of contracts. This strategy left public institutions increasingly unable to function by themselves. They made little effort to develop their internal expertise, not least when it came to the new frontier of digital services and databases. Both New Labour's military adventurism and its private finance agenda emanated from a belief that the market-led 'liberal democracy' would conquer the world after the Cold War, replacing backward governments with modern ones, fusty bureaucrats with dynamic entrepreneurs. Authorities in Kabul and Westminster alike would be swept away by this emerging order. Since the arc of history supposedly bent in its direction, the transformation would be mostly spontaneous. Policymakers were encouraged to step back and let it take its course. Their main role was to remove the obstacles to this telos via targeted interventions: overthrowing unfriendly dictators, repealing onerous regulations and waiting for peace and prosperity to follow. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But such progress never arrived. Instead, the Middle East was drenched in blood: cities bombed to oblivion, ancient heritage sites razed and ethnic conflicts inflamed, with a network of torture facilities springing up across the region to deal with popular resistance. The puppet government in Afghanistan hid out in its securitised Green Zone, siphoning off foreign aid while the rest of the country suffered an endless social crisis. Inequality widened, with basic services in short supply. Political opposition was monopolised by the Taliban, who could bide their time until the occupiers exhausted themselves. Nor was New Labour's 'modernising' vision realised on the home front, where opening the state to market competition brought no benefit to anyone apart from the successful competitors. Just as external actors took over what passed for public provision in Afghanistan, private entities assumed many of the traditional functions of government in Britain, creating a culture of kickbacks and corner-cutting, soaring costs and deteriorating services. Blair had assumed that he could remove the constraints on his 'Third Way' model – 'rogue regimes', nationalised utilities – and bask in its success. But in practice the elimination of those fetters led to perpetual crisis, which the government was forced to step in and manage: staying in the Middle East far longer than expected to attend to the aftermath of its invasions, while struggling to limit the blowback from its free-market reforms. This sequence of events unfolded not just in Britain but across the Global North, as governments joined foreign wars and delegated authority to big business. It soon gave rise to a paradoxical situation. New forms of international dependency were created, with impoverished client states becoming completely reliant on the imperial powers. At the same time, those powers themselves became dependent on predatory investors and asset-stripping corporations, with dire results for states and wider societies. So, as elites in Kabul looked to Western governments to stabilise their rule, they realised that the latter were grappling with their own set of instabilities, caused by the forward march of neoliberalism. Politicians in the developed world had forfeited their own sovereignty while trying to assert it over others. This dynamic contributed to the failure of the regime-change doctrine. These weakened states – internally atrophied and externally overstretched – were not up to the task of neocolonial governance. Their operations were often haphazard, their intelligence flawed. They never established hegemony, which requires the maintenance of power through a careful balance of coercion and consent. The mode of rule was based on the first far more than the second: domination pure and simple. Under this system, the original sins of colonialism began to proliferate. According to a BBC investigation, scores of Afghan civilians were executed by British special forces, with one SAS squadron reportedly competing internally to attain the highest body count. One veteran described it as 'routine' for soldiers to handcuff and kill detainees – including children – and then cover up their crimes by removing the restraints and planting weapons on the corpses. Killing, said another former fighter, was 'addictive'. 'On some operations, the troops would go into guesthouse-type buildings and kill everyone there… They'd go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry.' Countries that are run in this way tend to rebel against their rulers. The abrupt Nato withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, allowing the Taliban to regain control rapidly, was an open acknowledgement of that fact. Two decades of engagement had cost an estimated 243,000 lives without leaving behind any durable power structure. While some clung to the dream of an indefinite occupation, most of the political and military establishment recognised the urgent need to jump ship. Yet the notion that Britain could easily escape this quagmire was no less misguided than the decision to enter it in the first place. Relations of dependency do not disappear overnight. UK officials had to work out what to do about the significant number of Afghans who lent their services to the war effort, and who now have a legitimate claim to asylum. Once again, their response was astoundingly inept: first presiding over a leak-prone MoD that broadcast the collaborators' details on an unencrypted spreadsheet; then failing to notice the mistake for 18 months; then refusing to inform those it endangered; and finally launching a belated resettlement scheme under the cover of a super-injunction. Britain has now abandoned even this fleeting attempt to make up for its reckless activities. The Defence Secretary, John Healey, has announced that no more Afghans whose data was exposed will automatically be offered relocation in the UK, nor will they be given compensation. He assures us there is 'little evidence of intent from the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against former officials' – even though there is already a well-documented record of similar revenge attacks, and Healey admits he is 'unable to say for sure' whether people have been killed as a result of the breach. Naturally, the families of those featured on the spreadsheet are not as sanguine as he is about their possible fate. All this follows Labour's earlier decision to shut down safe routes for Afghan asylum seekers, abolishing both the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy and the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme. These were designed for those who had assisted UK forces along with other vulnerable groups, but have now been closed with immediate effect, as part of a broader attempt to outflank the anti-migrant politics of Reform UK. Starmer's intention, it seems, is simply to ignore the inconvenient fallout of the war on terror. The fantasy of building a harmonious Western-orientated Afghanistan has been swapped for the fantasy of evading the consequences of that project. It will not turn out well. The Labour Party's wars of aggression have reshaped 21st-century Britain, not to mention the Middle East, in ways that are impossible to repress. In particular, by promoting the narrative that Muslims are incapable of running their own countries and attempting to modernise them at gunpoint, they have legitimated the kind of Islamophobia Nigel Farage is now wielding against the main Westminster parties: calling for a hard-border regime to keep out those lacking in 'British values'. Farage has used the data breach to further incite such paranoia, claiming with no evidence that sex offenders have been allowed into the UK under the resettlement programme. The only principled and effective antidote to this reactionary tendency is a full rupture with the legacy of New Labour. The first step would be to reckon with the scale of suffering caused by foreign interventions and accept Britain's obligation to alleviate it to the greatest possible extent: by welcoming refugees, easing sanctions that continue to strangle the Afghan economy, and paying reparations. The real test of whether we've learnt from the 2000s, however, is whether we continue to repeat its mistakes. The current Labour government might be more wary of dispatching troops to faraway places. But it still sent RAF spy planes to aid Israeli intelligence operations in Gaza, and has supplied components for Israel's F-35 jets that are being used in air strikes, all in the service of a protracted regime-change campaign against Hamas. It refuses to rule out supporting a US-Israeli assault on Iran, which would inevitably cause mass death and displacement as well as creating many more refugees. If the government's main foreign policy ambition is to act as Washington's henchman, this is in part because its domestic policy is not designed to reclaim the sovereignty that was relinquished during the neoliberal period; it is characterised by the same mix of deregulation and deference to private interests. In this sense, the data leak offers a glimpse of a much wider problem: the ability of Blairism to survive amid the wreckage it has made. [See also: Israel and Gaza: A question of intent] Related
BBC News
16 hours ago
- Politics
- BBC News
NI Troubles: US space surveillance suggested during peace process
Surveillance from space by the USA was suggested as a way to verify that the IRA was decommissioning weapons during the peace idea was described as "off the wall" but "worth exploring" by a British details are contained in the note of a phone call contained in newly-released government papers from the National papers include files from the then Prime Minister Tony Blair's office on Northern Ireland and Ireland from the year 2000. At the time, there were discussions on the decommissioning of IRA idea that the US could use satellites to monitor whether IRA weapons dumps had been concreted over was raised in a meeting between Irish and US details were recorded in a note by an official in the Northern Ireland Office (NIO).According to the note, it was also suggested that satellites could "replicate the functions of the South Armagh towers". "But we were pretty clear that would not work," the NIO official said that when the idea was suggested, a senior diplomat had "laughed it out of the room". There were a number of army observation towers in south Armagh during the towers were later scrapped as part of the peace was not the only example where potential help from the USA was late Ulster Unionist Party leader and First Minister David Trimble suggested a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Louis Freeh, be appointed to "look into" racketeering and gangsterism in Northern Trimble made the suggestion during a meeting with NIO officials, according to the state papers. A number of papers also mention the early development of proposals by the UK government to deal with those known as On the On the Run letters provided assurance to over 100 people that they did not face arrest and prosecution for IRA the details were only made public during a court case involving a suspected IRA bomber in 2014. The papers also reveal tense meetings between British officials and Ulster Unionists over symbols, like the use of the Royal coat of arms in courtrooms and a redesign of the PSNI badge."Lord Kilclooney and Trimble complained at length about what they saw as the relentless diminution of Britishness in Northern Ireland," the note of a meeting from November 2001 said."Trimble said the publication of the proposed designs for a new police badge had 'ignited one hell of a row' within the UUP," a subsequent note NIO official also described a letter from Trimble to Blair on the situation within unionism as "singularly graceless and ill-timed".
The National
17 hours ago
- Politics
- The National
Is Jonathan Powell the UK's most influential diplomat?
He was brought into government to deal with the handover of the Chagos Islands, but within months Jonathan Powell became a near ubiquitous figure in UK diplomacy. The former chief of staff for Tony Blair left office after 10 years in 2007 but is now back as National Security Adviser, involved in issues ranging from the war in Ukraine, Bangladesh's corruption probe and Palestinian statehood recognition. Mr Powell, who led the Good Friday negotiations on Northern Ireland, was appointed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer in November last year. The experienced diplomat, who led his own conflict mediation charity until his appointment to government in 2024, appears to have quietly taken on a central role normally reserved for the foreign secretary. In the Middle East, Powell plays a more important role than David Lammy Turkish diplomatic source It was Mr Powell who met Bangladesh's interim leader Muhammad Yunus during his first official visit to the UK last month. He was in Istanbul the week that the PKK announced its intention to disarm, where he was pictured with the high-level delegation from Ukraine as it arrived for peace talks with Russia. He had been in Kyiv days before to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ahead of the now-cancelled UN peace summit on Israel-Palestine, Mr Powell was tasked with briefing MPs about the UK's future recognition of the Palestinian state. In the Middle East, his track record borders on the mythical. It is said that he persuaded the PKK to dissolve, and that he whispered the values of western governance to an obscure Islamist rebel years before he became Ahmad Al Shara, President of Syria. Former close colleagues of Mr Powell are now acting in an advisory role as the fledging administration finds it feet in Damascus. 'Jonathan Powell played an important role in terms of dealing with these very sensitive issues,' said a Turkish source. 'He is like a foreign minister. In the Middle East, Powell plays a more important role than David Lammy.' A former UK diplomat who served across the Middle East agreed. 'Yes,' they told The National, when asked whether Mr Powell could be the UK's unofficial foreign secretary. Well-networked, well-travelled, Mr Powell navigates the UK's overseas matters seamlessly. Unburdened by politics as an elected MP would be, he can take more risks. Mr Powell's charity Inter/Mediate, which he co-founded in 2011, played key mediation roles in the Turkish conflict with the PKK, and the rebel-led opposition government of Idlib before the toppling of president Bashar Al Assad last year. Mr Powell reportedly met Mr Al Shara in May 2021, in person. Mr Powell stepped down from the charity after his return to government and there is no suggestion that he has been involved in Inter/Mediate since then. Severing links with a charity in UK law means the former executive has no remaining interest in the operation. The latest accounts filed to the Charity Commission show the company's assets had grown to £1,625,316 from £668,745 a year earlier. It had increased its employees by two to 13 and adopted an investment plan of up to £1.75 million in the business over five years. It said it had exceeded its fundraising targets and gained from a 'greater commitment from the [Foreign Office] through a new partnership agreement with the Office of Conflict and Stabilisation'. An examination of Inter/Mediate's involvement in conflicts in the Middle East shows the legacy of 'third rail diplomacy' that Mr Powell has brought with him into the National Security Adviser role. It raises questions about the influence that former New Labour figures play in Mr Starmer's government. Many of them were brought in to fill key roles in the administration, such Peter Mandelson, a former cabinet minister in Mr Blair's government who is now the UK's Ambassador in Washington. Mr Starmer is said to have told his cabinet to reject some of the core principles of Blairism, such as unquestioning globalisation and free-flow immigration. In the rank and file of the parliamentary party there are concerns, not only about the power of Mr Powell but also about Liz Lloyd, the Director of Policy Delivery, who was once Mr Powell's deputy. Speculation is rife that Tim Allan, the founder of PR firm Portland, is being wooed to accept a new role as permanent secretary of a department of communications to sharpen the government's message and take on disinformation. Turkey's peace Mr Powell became involved in the Turkey-Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) conflict in 2013, when the Turkish government initiated a peace process. A delegation of Turkish and Kurdish MPs travelled to the UK and Ireland that year to learn about the Good Friday Agreement. One Kurdish MP, Ayla Akat, recalled Mr Powell comparing negotiations to a bicycle: 'you've got to keep pedalling or you fall over'. The thorny issue was amplified by the US arming the armed wings of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in north-east Syria in the fight against ISIS in 2017, which also saw Mr Powell offer his expertise. Turkey continued to view the group as an extension of the PKK, and felt deeply betrayed by the new US alliance. Working with the UK-based think tank the Democratic Progress Institute, Mr Powell and his team developed a programme which drew on the lessons from Northern Ireland. They briefed Turkish MPs from the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP). 'The American thinking was one day there will be a withdrawal from Syria. When that day comes they didn't want the Syrian Kurds to enter a conflict with Turkey. They wanted to prepare ground work for that,' the source said. Under the Biden administration, the US reached out to Turkey to propose a deal with the PYD, a source said. The overall situation has moved quickly to become a fully fledged peace process. Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, made his first appearance on camera this month in more than two decades. He told the group to lay down its weapons and move towards non-violent politics as its 'national liberation war strategy' had 'come to an end'. The UK also become involved in these talks, and Mr Powell's Inter/Mediate has a long history of involvement, under contract with the UK, with the PYD and Turkey. Syria rebuild Mr Powell first met Ahmad Al Shara – who formerly went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed Al Jawlani – in 2015. Western governments at the time were seeking ways to maintain a footing within Syria, having severed ties with the Assad regime. After Al Shara moved on to Damascus, two consultants from Inter/Mediate followed to the Presidential Palace, supplementing a role the charity had in what appears to have been a legacy contract. Inter/Mediate's executive director Claire Hajaj and long-term projects director Lucy Stuart have been advising the president's office in Damascus as it looks to restore government to Syria, multiple sources said. Though widely praised, the under-the-radar nature of that work is also contributing to conspiracy theories about how a western-backed push for regime change eventually achieved its goals. When Donald Trump visits the UK he will do so in a private capacity. That means Mr Starmer's visit to the US President at his golf course, expected early next week, must take place without officials. Mr Powell's status as a special adviser to the Prime Minister has been controversial within the Whitehall system. But as his visit to China last week demonstrated, as well as one-on-one meetings with India's Foreign Minister and others, he can take on a public role. It should mean that under the rules he can be at the Prime Minister's side as the UK leader drops in unofficially on Mr Trump.
Bloomberg
18 hours ago
- Politics
- Bloomberg
A Reluctant Case for ID Cards in Britain
The debate over national identity cards is the hardy perennial of British politics. John Major floated voluntary ID cards in the mid-1990s only for the idea to fizzle out. Tony Blair introduced comprehensive legislation in 2006 — and a pilot scheme to boot — but the 2010 coalition government withdrew the legislation. Now the push is beginning again, with Labour Together, a think tank close to Keir Starmer, adding its voice to seasoned politicians such as Blair and William Hague. Let us hope this time the perennial bears fruit. I sympathize with the libertarian arguments against ID cards, which change the relationship between the state and the citizen. They are at odds with the common law tradition that relies heavily on the notion of ancient liberties (the holdouts against the global trend toward identity cards have all been common law countries). 'Papers please' has an irreducibly Prussian ring to it.
Arab News
a day ago
- Politics
- Arab News
New UK records reveal Bush viewed Iraq war as a ‘crusade'
LONDON: A series of released records in the UK have revealed that President George W. Bush viewed the Iraq war as a 'crusade.' Cabinet Office papers made public on Tuesday show Bush considered the US 'God's chosen nation' tasked with ridding the world of 'evil-doers,' including Saddam Hussein. Sir Christopher Meyer, the UK's ambassador to Washington, wrote in December 2002 in a diplomatic cable to Whitehall: 'More than anything else, he (Bush) fears another catastrophic terrorist attack on the homeland, especially one with an Iraqi connection.' He added: 'His view of the world is Manichean. He sees his mission as ridding it of evil-doers. He believes American values should be universal values. He finds the Europeans' differentiation between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein self-serving. 'He is strongly allergic to Europeans collectively. Anyone who has sat round a dinner table with low-church Southerners will find these sentiments instantly recognisable.' In January 2023, Sir Tony Blair met with Bush in the US to urge him to use diplomacy, but Sir Christopher wrote Jan. 29: 'It is politically impossible for Bush to back down from going to war in Iraq this spring, absent Saddam's surrender or disappearance from the scene.' On Jan. 30, Sir David Manning, a UK foreign policy adviser, told Sir Tony to warn Bush that a UN resolution was 'politically essential for the UK, and almost certainly legally essential as well.' Sir David told Condoleezza Rice, Bush's secretary of state, that an invasion of Iraq without one could bring down the Labour government, and that 'the US must not promote regime change in Baghdad at the price of regime change in London.' He added in a message to Sir Tony: 'I said that Bush could afford to gamble. He wanted a second resolution but it was not crucial to him. He already had congressional authority to act unilaterally. This was quite different from the situation you were facing. 'Condi acknowledged this but said that there came a point in any poker game when you had to show your cards. I said this was fine for Bush. He would still be at the table if he showed his cards and lost. You would not.' The cables also reveal other aspects of Sir Tony's time in office, including a birthday message from Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2001. 'Dear Tony,' the message read, 'accept my sincere congratulations on your birthday and heartfelt wishes of good health, happiness, success and well being to you and your family. 'With great warmth I recollect our last meeting in Stockholm, I am convinced that regular contacts between us will further facilitate the development of Russian-British relations, strengthening international security and stability.' Other revelations include a thorny diplomatic incident, when former French President Jacques Chirac had spoken in private to Sir Tony about Clare Short, the international development secretary, to complain she was 'viscerally anti-French and insupportable.' In an effort to improve relations with Chirac, UK officials also considered purchasing a map of Afghanistan for Chirac denoting British military failures in the country for 'a laugh' for his birthday in November 2001.
